


No Words

by InTheWind



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Episode: s04e10 Hush, F/F, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-10
Updated: 2013-11-10
Packaged: 2018-01-01 01:10:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1038555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InTheWind/pseuds/InTheWind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tara tries to put her feelings for Willow down on paper at the end of Hush.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Words

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WhatBecomesOfYou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhatBecomesOfYou/gifts).



_Dear Willow,_

_I’ve never been good at the whole talking thing._

_That shouldn’t surprise you.  It’s probably the first thing you learned about me—if you noticed me at all, that one time when you showed up to Wicca Group.  I noticed you.  It was hard not to—you kind of stood out, among all the crunchy con artists and witchy wannabes.  You wanted to talk about real magic, and all you found was some pseudo-sisterhood.  I wanted to stand up for you so badly, and I almost did… but then everyone was staring and waiting for me to say something and the words in my head just kinda went poof! and disappeared until someone else started talking instead._

_That happens to me a lot.  It happens less when I’m around you.  I feel safe when you’re around, like I can have an opinion and share it and you’re not going to tell me I’m stupid or even secretly think it.  But still, there are some things that I can’t say, even around you.  Not yet, anyway.  So that’s why I’m writing this down, so that even if I can’t speak the words, you’ll know someday that I… feel things.  About you._

“Feel things,” Tara sighed, eyeing the notebook in her lap with disdain.  “Great.  I could feel things about a toaster, that doesn’t mean anything.”

She ran her thumb up the length of the pen, over the bumps and ridges of old bite marks from late nights past.  This wasn’t exactly going in the direction she’d hoped.  Still, it was a thousand times more eloquent than what she’d managed to say out loud so far, which was exactly nothing.  She decided to keep going.

_Yesterday, when nobody else was doing the talking thing either, it was the first time I felt normal.  I was the same as everybody else.  Or rather, everybody else was the same as me.  Somehow I thought I’d like it that way… but it just felt all wrong.  I missed hearing words.  I missed **saying** words… or at least, you know, having the option to maybe say some words, at some point in time that isn’t now._

Tara rolled her eyes at herself.  “How many times can I write the word ‘words’ in one paragraph?”

_Anyway.  I knew that whatever was going on, there had to be magic involved—did they really think they were fooling anyone with the laryngitis thing?—and I thought that maybe, with magic, someone could fix it.  I thought we could fix it, together.  And… okay, we didn’t.  But we did something!  And that something was incredible.  I’ve never felt a connection like that before, and from the way you looked at me I thought that maybe you might have felt it too.  You must have, right, in that second when you first took my hand?  How else could you have known exactly what I wanted us to do?_

_It was then that I realized how badly I want to know you.  Not because of the whole magic thing—although don’t get me wrong, that was pretty cool—but because of the way you looked at me in that moment.  I could see in your eyes that you trusted me.  That you **saw** me—Tara, the witch, not the geek who just takes up space.  You trusted me to help you.  You believed that I could.  No one has looked at me like that since my mom died._

_That was when I first realized that I might maybe fall in love with you someday.  I can’t see the future—that kind of magic is way too advanced for me—but somehow I just know that you’re supposed to be in my life.  I’m writing this down now just to put it out there into the universe, because I want you to know, even if I never work up the nerve to say it out loud.  You are special, Willow Rosenberg.  Maybe someday I’ll tell you that._

_Maybe someday, a long time from now, I’ll even tell you I love you._

“Hey,” came a soft voice as a shadow appeared over Tara’s notebook.  “What’cha doing, homework?  You’d think they would have given us a break on that, you know, what with the whole town-wide ‘laryngitis’ epidemic and everything.  Oh, yeah, and the monsters.”

In a panic, Tara slammed the book shut.  “Homework,” she repeated.  “Yeah.  Yeah, I’m just, you know, catch—catching up.”  She could feel her cheeks burning red, and deliberately looked down, letting her hair fall over her face in the hopes that Willow wouldn’t notice.  It was a tactic that worked well for rendering her invisible to most people, but Willow was not most people.

“Well, I was going to walk over to the student center if you feel like taking a break,” Willow said, undeterred.  “I thought maybe we could talk, now that we can… you know… talk.”

_I’ve never been good at the whole talking thing._

Tara peered through her curtain of hair to see Willow smiling hopefully at her.  She couldn’t help but smile back.  “O-okay,” she replied.

“Good,” Willow said as she waited for Tara to gather her things.  “I wanted to say thanks for helping me with the soda machine,” she continued.  “There’s no way I could have moved that thing all by myself.”

“Oh, you probably could have eventually,” Tara demurred.  “Besides, the least I could do was help you hide after I knocked you down in the hallway… s-sorry about that, by the way.”

“That’s okay.  Actually I think it’s lucky we ran into each other—there doesn’t really seem to be an overabundance of people on campus who can really do anything, magic-wise.  So really it was great timing that you were there when the Gentlemen—I mean, the monsters—came.”

“Well, um, actually, I should maybe tell you something about that…”  She clutched her notebook tighter, suddenly afraid that it would fly out of her hands somehow and open to the exact page that would expose _all_ the things she felt she should tell Willow, none of which she was anywhere near ready to say.  An old scuff-mark on the floor suddenly became fascinating.  “I, uh… I d-didn’t just happen to run into you.  I was looking for you, actually.  I heard you in Wicca Group talking about doing magic, and I’d looked up some spells that I thought we could… I don’t know…”

“You thought we could cast a spell to get everyone’s voices back?” Willow supplied.  Her voice was bright enough to draw Tara’s gaze away from the floor.  “Do you do that often?” she asked.  “The spell-casting, I mean?”

“Oh, you know, just sometimes,” Tara said with a shrug and an embarrassed smile.

“That’s so cool!” Willow exclaimed.  “Come on,” she said, already starting off in the direction of the student center.  “We’ve got a _ton_ to talk about.”

Tara hurried after her, still clutching the notebook.

_I’ve never been good at the whole talking thing._

_Maybe someday I’ll even tell you I love you.  
_


End file.
